How to Write Fiction by The Guardian

the character, how he notices only what’s important to the character, in close-up, how precisely Hemingway renders the spatial arrangement of the matador’s posture as he strikes, how he makes the unfamiliar familiar with a homely simile, how rapid action can be conveyed indirectly by the confusing gaps in events after the irrevocable has already happened. This is description at its most purposeful and it quickens the pulse:
    He could remember when he was good and it had been only three years before. He could remember the weight of his heavy gold-brocaded fighting jacket on his shoulders on that hot afternoon in May when his voice had still been the same in the ring as in the cafe, and how he sighted along the point-dipping blade at the place in the top of the shoulders where it was dusty in the short-haired black hump of muscle above the wide, wood-knocking, splintered-tipped horns that lowered as he went in to kill, and how the sword pushed in as easy as into a mound of stiff butter with the palm of his hand pushing the pommel, his left arm crossed low, his left shoulder forward, his weight on his left leg, and then his weight wasn’t on his leg. His weight was on his lower belly and as the bull raised his head the horn was out of sight in him and he swung over on it twice before they pulled him off it.
    Adam Foulds is the author of two novels and The Broken Word, a narrative poem. He has received a number of awards including the Costa poetry prize, the Sunday Times young writer of the year and the Encore award. His latest novel, The Quickening Maze (Vintage), was shortlisted for the Booker prize

Writer’s workshop 6
    Playing with the power of adverbs and adjectives
    N o description includes every single detail. Description is a matter of making choices: the choice of what to put in, and what to leave out, is the writer’s. Everyone’s living room is pretty much the same, but ask 20 people to describe their living rooms and you’ll get 20 different descriptions.
    1 Describe your living room in a few paragraphs.
    You’ve chosen to mention a particular set of details: another person might have chosen a different set. Think about why you chose to mention the things you did and why you left out the things you did. Does that say something about you as well as something about your living room?
    This is an undirected description: a description in limbo. Can it be made to reveal something further? First, can your description reveal something more about the room?
    2 Rewrite this description, using basically the same information, but change whatever you need to so that the reader can guess at what has just been happening in the room. Use all the senses. You’ll have to start inventing here, adding to the real information with pieces that you make up and leaving out anything that works against what you’re trying to convey.
    Instead of having to tell the reader what’s been going on, you can let the description do so in an oblique way which may be more interesting.
    There’s a second level that the description can reveal: something about the narrator doing the describing.
    3 Rewrite the description, showing not only what has just been happening in the room, but how the narrator feels about what has just been happening in the room. You might have to change what has been happening. You will probably choose different kinds of words, perhaps more emotive ones. You may vary the sentence structure by using, for example, exclamations, questions, very short sentences, and so on. You may find an image to focus the feeling. Make sure you’re still describing the room, not describing feelings.
    Now we will turn to people.
    4 Take one of the descriptions of people you wrote in Writer’s workshop 2 and rewrite it without using any adjectives or adverbs.
    This will force you to be very specific, and to “show” rather than “tell”. If the character looks hungry or tense, what